Plain Text Accounting with ledger and its ecosystem

Plain Text Accounting with ledger and its ecosystem

Plain Text Accounting is the practice of maintaining a ledger in a format that values human readability, accountant auditability, and version control. The ledger-like ecosystem enables recording of purchases and transfers and investments, versioning of ledger-files to provide an audit trail, and performing analysis to produce registers, balance sheets, profit and loss statements, track billable time and paid time off, and lots of other reports. In this presentation, you’ll learn some basic accounting principals, ledger tool usage, and why you might choose plain text accounting over Quicken, QuickBooks, Mint.com, or You Need a Budget.

Colin Dean has been using plain text accounting tools for more than four years. He runs the fledgling /r/plaintextaccounting reddit and has contributed to the ledger-like ecosystem.